Tuesday

Yardbird

When I was young,my mother had a cat she called yardbird,because, she said, the ripples his shanksmade as he strolled our streetreminded her of a night in Tunisia;a place that waited for her most eveningsbeneath a diamond wieghted with nickles,under shades draped in faded red.

Bird would follow her there,a slink of sinew and strut around shadow.Sphinx-posed on her lap, she would offer himdips in a glass of warm Dewars,run rough hands through his black coatand whisper "I would wear you like a skin,heat-heavy in alleys and jazz dives, my tonguetight for the taste of something more than this."

When he died, alone while the house slept,she buried him by the back steps; his cool bonesleft to dust themselves in a shoebox lacedwith shots of scotch, shards of pressed wax.She never went back to Tunisia; sat instead,when the weather was good, on the last rise of a low stoop, and watched the paper mill stacksflick their soot tails against the smooth night sky.

3 comments:

You have a fantastic talent for characterization and storytelling in such a compact space. Five Days is a fantastic piece, but your talent for this really shines in the shortest pieces like Around the Kitchen Night, Yardbird and Love is Relative.

GRIND IT UP AND SPIT IT OUT, THEY SAID

Eat Your Words

"I know we're not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don't know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don't care that we don't."— Dylan Thomas